We have a strange relationship with politicians don’t we? On the one hand, most of us don’t trust them, and on the other, we believe that they will still get the ‘Big Stuff’ right. After all, they know what the country needs.
And when a crisis comes along, they’ll be fully prepared won’t they? Because they’ll have planned for it.
Well, if their response to the Covid pandemic is anything to go by, they can’t be trusted in a crisis either. The politicians in many countries got things badly wrong and that cost a lot more lives than it should have done, had they actually been prepared.
I mean, we all knew that, eventually, a pandemic would come along, didn’t we? We were being warned by experts, and near misses like Ebola and SARS.
But they still dropped the ball.
In Britain, we didn’t have enough PPE stock-piled, and what there was of it, was out-of-date.
The government didn’t think to protect care homes, even though we’d seen Covid devastate care homes in Europe before it got here. We just hung the care homes out to dry.
We didn’t lock down soon enough, costing thousands more lives, and we came out of lock-down too early. And we repeated that same mistake again. And again.
It was clear that there was no plan, they were just making it up as they went along.
So, what hope do we have for the REALLY big stuff like Climate Change? Can we really trust these incompetent buffoons to get that right? Do they even understand the actual issues?
Frankly, I don’t know.
COP 26, the annual, world climate conference, arrives in Britain in a few short weeks. This one is crucial, as we are already behind schedule if we want to prevent 2 degrees C of warming, let alone 1.5C, which is what was actually agreed back in 2015.
All countries need to up their ambition now because what they’ve promised so far won’t get us to net zero carbon by 2050.
They also need to turn fine words and promises into action because too little is actually being done. [The UK government, for example, is dining out on what it’s done in the past and deadlines set way in the future, whilst it does next to nothing in the present].
And they need to make emissions cuts faster and more deeply to even have a chance of avoiding catastrophic warming. At present, carbon emissions are still rising year-on-year. That has to flatten out immediately, and go into rapid decline throughout the 2020s to give us a chance.
These emissions cuts are still possible - we already have the technology to make it happen – but the politicians have to have the political will to make it happen.
And a plan.
